Electronic devices, such as sensors, transceivers, transmitters, receivers, antennas, etc., may be configured in arrays to transmit or receive data in a two dimensional format or to effect a desired resolution for a given area. For example, one known sensor used in a computed tomography (CT) system includes a photodiode array comprising an array of photosensitive pixels coupled to a scintillating medium, which can also be configured as an array of scintillator cells. When subjected to x-ray energy, the scintillators generate optical photons which in turn excite the underlying photosensitive pixels within the photodiode array thereby producing a set of analog electrical signals, each corresponding to an incident photon flux.
One exemplary CT detector array is known to be configured with a plurality of sensor elements, where, as described above, each sensor element in the CT detector array in turn comprises an x-ray scintillator deposited on a pixel array of photosensitive light sensors. Thus, even a single sensor element may be referred to herein as “sensor arrays.” A data acquisition system (DAS) may acquire the analog signals from the sensors and convert these signals to digital signals for subsequent processing.
During the operation of CT systems with photodiode sensor arrays, the sensor array temperature may vary, for example, due to varying environmental conditions. These temperature variations may affect the performance of the CT system, possibly leading to degraded imaging performance in the event of a large temperature variation outside from an established temperature range.
Accordingly, aspects of the present invention provide an interface assembly for thermally coupling a data acquisition system (DAS) to a sensor array that allows measuring temperature variations of the sensor array and may provide effective control of such temperature variations, thus ensuring optimal performance of the CT system.